EMERALD BOWL / A gem in the rough? / Time may be right for bowl success in S.F.

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, November 25, 2004

Photo: Liz Mangelsdorf

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emeraldbowl010_lm.JPG Event on 11/22/04 in San Francisco.
Gary Cavalli, left, and Pat Gallagher at SBC Park, where the Emerald Bowl college football bowl game will be played. They are verteran sports-events producers and are the chief operators behind the Emerald Bowl.
Liz Mangelsdorf / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT Sports#Sports#Chronicle#11/25/2004#ALL#5star##0422481266 less

emeraldbowl010_lm.JPG Event on 11/22/04 in San Francisco.
Gary Cavalli, left, and Pat Gallagher at SBC Park, where the Emerald Bowl college football bowl game will be played. They are verteran sports-events ... more

Photo: Liz Mangelsdorf

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SFBOWL_004_CAG.JPG
Boston College's Derrick Knight fights for a few more yards with Colorado State's Andre Sommersell, top, and Benny Mastropaolo, bottom, in tow during the first quarter of play at the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl on New Year's Eve on Wednesday, December 31, 2003. Knight rushed for two touchdowns in the first half alone, and Boston led at the half 21-7. Event on 12/31/03, in San Francisco, Ca. Photo By Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The San Francisco Chronicle BC's Derrick Knight is a hard man to bring down, as Colorado State's Andre Sommersell (96) and Benny Mastropaolo discover. BC's Derrick Knight is a hard man to bring down, as Colorado State's Andre Sommersell (96) and Benny Mastropaolo discover. MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT Sports#Sports#Chronicle#11/25/2004#ALL#5star##0421550563 less

SFBOWL_004_CAG.JPG
Boston College's Derrick Knight fights for a few more yards with Colorado State's Andre Sommersell, top, and Benny Mastropaolo, bottom, in tow during the first quarter of play at the Diamond ... more

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez

EMERALD BOWL / A gem in the rough? / Time may be right for bowl success in S.F.

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Gary Cavalli and Pat Gallagher have engendered such respect in the Bay Area as sports businessmen that any project they endorse is given the benefit of a doubt. But when Cavalli announced in May 2002 that a college bowl game would be played at Pacific Bell Park, and that he and Gallagher were behind it, some wondered whether the pair had suffered marketing meltdown.

There was a reason San Francisco had never hosted a college bowl game: Pro sports rule the Bay Area, particularly in football. Given that this fall, with Cal's success and the pro teams' failure, is an aberration, college athletics around here seem to exist only as background noise to the day's meaningful sports conversations. And with many bowls struggling to survive amid the bowl proliferation, the idea of a San Francisco bowl seemed akin to reviving the Edsel.

But Cavalli, a onetime Stanford sports information director who later founded a successful women's basketball league, and Gallagher, the president of Giants Enterprises, are fighting the odds -- with the Emerald Bowl. The third edition will be played Dec. 30 at SBC Park. Whether it will become an established event in the Bay Area and college football remains to be seen.

In a way, the challenge of creating a successful bowl game in San Francisco is like the A's trying to field a championship-caliber team. Logic and market forces suggested doom, but with deft maneuvering and a little luck, the A's demonstrated it can happen. The added task for the Emerald Bowl is to get the Bay Area sports fan on board, too.

"They also said Stanford would never be a national powerhouse in basketball, and they said San Francisco was not a baseball town," said Gallagher. "I think we can make it happen. We'll see."

The college football buzz around Cal and its Rose Bowl quest will give an indirect bump to the Emerald Bowl this year. What's critical for consistent buzz, as Emerald Bowl officials have discovered, is getting the right team to play on the right day. They thought they had found a way this season, by switching from New Year's Eve to the afternoon of Dec. 30 and by getting a Pac- 10 affiliation. They've had to modify the Pac-10 part but think the alternative team, Navy, may be better for this year than the Pac-10 team they fought hard to get.

This is a pivotal year, but not a make-or-break year for the Emerald Bowl, whose backers sustained tiny losses the first two seasons, when it was known as the Diamond Walnut Bowl, but expect to be in the black this time around.

"Some people say San Francisco is not a great college football town," Cavalli said. "But I don't think it's a 'bad' college football town as much as the volume of things there are to do around here. It's whether we can get on the radar."

Adding essential ingredients

In building their bowl game, Gallagher, Emerald Bowl executive director Cavalli and San Francisco Bowl Game chairman John Marks realized it needs to have a Pac-10 team, so they got one, although forces beyond their control will delay the Pac-10 entry until next season. They also realized Bay Area folks were unlikely to come to a football game on New Year's Eve, so they junked the date and time used the first two years and put the game on the afternoon of Dec. 30, possibly sacrificing some television revenue to make the change.

These two changes were made to fit Bay Area tastes. Many moves had already been made to fit the tastes of bowl-going football programs, earning credibility.

Any bowl has to earn a national reputation for being efficient and accommodating, which is why Cavalli made sure Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer had a steady supply of Johnnie Walker in his room so he could sip his favorite scotch in the days before the 2002 game, and why he lined up golf games for Boston College athletic director Eugene DeFilippo last year, and why he arranged team trips to Alcatraz, and why he turned a hotel ballroom into a locker room for practices.

And then there were the nuts and bolts of marketing and money that had to be secured.

Right at the start, Cavalli and Gallagher knew enough to reject an offer to transplant the failed Freedom Bowl and its failed name to San Francisco, a 1999 conversation that got them thinking about a bowl game. They nearly pulled the trigger on having the troubled Aloha Bowl move from Hawaii to San Francisco in 2000, but bothersome loose ends convinced Cavalli and Gallagher they should create a new bowl.

And they needed a safety net, which is why the Giants are part of the equation. In exchange for guaranteeing to back any bowl losses, the baseball team gets a fee (a little over $100,000) for the use of the stadium and the promotional value of a non-baseball event at SBC Park.

Some bowls get financial backing from the city or local government. The Sun Bowl, for example, gets 5 percent of all El Paso rental car fees, which amounts to $1 million a year. There's no such revenue for a San Francisco bowl, and the Emerald Bowl organizers knew it's overly ambitious to expect big financial gains from such a venture early on, if at all. That's why the bowl is a nonprofit event, put on primarily to help a San Francisco tourism industry that ebbs precipitously in the week between Christmas and New Years.

Whatever the profit goal, a corporate sponsor is a must, which is why the game is known as the Emerald Bowl, after earlier appearances as the Diamond Walnut Bowl. Acquiring a major sponsor took some luck, like having the CEO of Diamond of California, Michael Mendes, pick up the Chronicle during a flight and notice an advertisement for the new bowl game in San Francisco, which was seeking a sponsor. Emerald is the name of a snack-food subsidiary of Diamond that the company wants to promote, and it works out fine for the bowl people because Emerald Bowl has a nice pure ring to it. The Emerald Bowl sounds more like a college football game than, say, the Continental Tire Bowl.

Selling the game

Cavalli was prepared to handle these issues, having been a sports information director at Stanford during the free-wheeling bowl days of the 1970s, when Bill Walsh got a bowl invitation while standing in the shower following the Big Game. Those old-school experiences came in handy for Cavalli this season as he had to woo Navy away from several other bowls.

And Cavalli knows innovation because he had been the founder and director of a ground-breaking women's pro basketball league, the American Basketball League, that prospered for two years before being eaten up by the deep pockets of the WNBA.

So does Gallagher, the longtime Giants marketing mind who sought non- baseball events at SBC Park. So does Marks, the president of the San Francisco Convention and Visitor's Bureau. He had spent 13 years as committee chairman of the Fiesta Bowl board in the 1970s and '80s, when it became the model for West Coast bowl success.

What they don't know, for sure, is whether a college bowl game can become "the place to be." Emerald Bowl officials can't depend on local teams raising the Bay Area's awareness of college football. They have to play to the area's habits.

"The Bay Area is an entertainment market," Gallagher said. "If something is considered good entertainment, people will come, and price won't keep people away."

Though successful in its primary goal of attracting visitors (Marks claims the game brought an additional 5,600 room-nights to San Francisco hotels), the first two games drew around 26,000 people each, about 11,000 under football capacity.

Time and teams

Marks and his colleagues realized the time and date (7:30 p.m., New Year's Eve) was an issue when they ran a trivia question contest on a local radio station with the prize being a chance to announce 10 plays over the public address system during last year's bowl game. They awarded 20 winners, and none could make it to the game.

New Year's Eve is a great time to watch college football on TV, which is why ESPN loved the time and offered the Emerald Bowl right fees about midway between the going rate for bowls ($0 to $500,000). But Bay Area folks aren't prone to go out to watch unfamiliar teams play college football on New Year's Eve, a time set aside for celebration.

Cavalli worked hard with ESPN to have the time changed to Dec. 30 at 1:30 p.m., having to give a little on the rights fees if ratings and advertising sales drop. ESPN agreed because, as ESPN's Dave Brown said, "All the (rating) numbers put up by the bowls greatly exceed what we would have put in that spot otherwise. Only the baseball playoffs and our NFL game do better. I think the Emerald Bowl numbers will be about the same as last year (1.6), and if it doesn't work, we'll look at it again."

Now for the teams. A survey of Giants fans this year showed that Bay Area fans overwhelmingly preferred a Pac-10 team. A clause in the Emerald Bowl's contract with the Big East allowed it to void that agreement if the makeup of the conference changed significantly, which it has.

So Cavalli went to the Pac-10 earlier this year and tried to secure the Pac-10's No. 6 team, which had been going to the Silicon Valley Classic in San Jose.

Proximity to bowls has become important to conferences, and the Pac-10 was eager to lock up an affiliation with every West Coast bowl game, which it did by agreeing to have its No. 6 team go to the Emerald Bowl and its No. 7 team go to the Silicon Valley Classic.

The ideal for the Emerald Bowl would be to have Cal or Stanford in its game, with the promise of a big crowd and increased publicity more than offsetting any loss of tourism revenue. Stanford and Cal were possibilities until the Cardinal nose-dived and the Bears ascended.

Calling in the Navy

This season, the Emerald Bowl has been robbed of its Pac-10 representative because only five Pac-10 teams are bowl eligible (a team must win at least six games). The tradeoff was that Cavalli knew two weeks ago he could not get a Pac-10 team and was able to get Navy, an independent with plenty of prestige.

Cavalli landed Navy over four other bowls -- Liberty Bowl, Houston Bowl, Motor City Bowl and Tangerine Bowl -- partly because the Emerald Bowl could make an offer now, and partly because Cavalli knew what he was doing. Cavalli figures the regional interest lost by not having a Pac-10 team will be offset by the national intrigue of Navy. Navy supporters bought nearly 24,000 tickets to last season's Houston Bowl and 22,000 of them showed up for the game. And Cavalli desperately wants people in the seats.

"I think Navy would have been better than any Pac-10 team we could have had, other than Stanford or Cal," Cavalli said.

Navy, which is 8-2 going into its finale against Army, will be matched against a Mountain West team, probably either Wyoming or New Mexico. Emerald Bowl officials won't have much choice in that berth, which is typical these days.

The bowl business has changed dramatically the past 20 years. In 1988, only 16 bowls existed, and few had an affiliation with a conference. It was a free-for-all, with the bowl representatives in the loud jackets courting teams throughout the year in all sorts of ways, trying to get teams to commit several weeks before the end of the regular season so they could begin promoting.

Now, bowls and teams just wait to see how things fall. That has not dampened the ambitions of the Emerald Bowl folks, who ultimately would like to move up the ladder, perhaps matching the Pac-10's fourth-place team against the Mountain West champ or a fourth-place team in the enlarged Atlantic Coast Conference.

"Having a sixth team from the Pac-10 is a little shaky, because Pac-10 teams usually don't play the cupcakes teams other conferences do sometimes to get bowl eligible," Cavalli said.

The Emerald Bowl also wants to move into the second tier of bowls, the ones offering more than $1 million per team.

Changes in the bowls' payments and conference affiliations are possible because virtually all contracts among television, bowls and conferences expire after two more seasons, when ABC, Fox and the BCS begin a new arrangement. The Emerald Bowl will still be around, playing in the sunlight at beautiful SBC Park, perhaps with a fourth-place Pac-10 team like Cal against a Mountain West champ like Utah. Maybe those guys weren't crazy.

Bowling in S.F.

Salient facts surrounding the 3rd Emerald Bowl at SBC Park:

Date, time, television: Dec. 30, 1:30 p.m., ESPN.

Navy's possible opponent: New Mexico or Wyoming.

The first two games drew around 26,000 people each, about 11,000 under football capacity.

Sixth-place Pac-10 team obligated to play in Emerald; however, this year only five Pac-10 teams qualified for bowls.

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